The Poisonous Fruit Of The Randian Sexual Paradise

“I don’t even want a boyfriend. I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time and thinks I’m the best person in the world and wants to have sex with only me.”- Hannah Horvath

My mother likes to observe to other less jaded homeschool moms that no matter how well trained a teenage male might be, if he’s alone in his room for hours at a time he’s probably not memorizing his catechism.

My adolescence was spent in the conservative evangelical subculture that had the same approach to sexuality as I did at 14: obsessed with high ideals, beset by inconsistent practices, surrounded by a larger sexually schizophrenic culture, and awkwardly enamored with its own thoughts on the subject. We are still trying to figure out exactly how to talk constructively about sexuality in public, which naturally leads to experimentation. Who’d have thought pastors would describe explicit sexual activities and liberated feminists would put content warnings on their essays? Discussing what our couplings mean and how we ought to publicly speak about them is important, yet fraught with danger of doing harm.

One of the more peculiar 2013 year-in-review articles both celebrated sexual liberation and expressed shock and surprise that capitalism had killed it. I won’t quote the article itself. I will observe that the author rejects the “sexual economics theory” that reduces people to their body parts and then merely a paragraph later decides that because body parts are sometimes all that one wants, such desires should be our guide to sexual decision-making. The people who have been taught for years that sexuality must be atomized to individual choices and pleasures now unsurprisingly love a song celebrating a sexually aggressive man doing just that, while the people who are privileged enough to have enjoyed that atomization are now upset. For so long, though, we have opened the field for businessmen to exploit the bodies of people in order to take the money of others who either pay for the privilege of depersonalizing someone else or pay for the privilege of having their own bodily anxieties exploited. This media spectacle—as well as the reciprocal outrage by traditional moralists on social media and elsewhere that feeds the celebrity machine and the self-righteousness of the ranter—can only be described as onanistic.

This broader capitalist rape culture benefits greatly from both the fantasy that sexual urges are completely uncontrollable except in the cases where someone says “no” and the vestiges of pseudo-Christian morality that assigns as much blame as possible to the victims of sexual aggression. Ross Douthat has observed that a libertarian vision of a perfectly transparent free market is as unrealistic as an libertine vision of perfectly free decision-making. Sex and the representation of hypersexualized bodies becomes a chaotic mess of people using sex for whatever power it gives them over others. Wendell Berry takes this apart quite skillfully in his essay Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community:

If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.

In this sexually Darwinistic world, those not desirable or desperate enough to be exploited are, of course, free to couple with one another and quite a number do. Most armchair defenders of sexual libertinism don’t take advantage of the freedom to hook up as conservatives fear that they do (surprise: it’s a privilege of the wealthy!) and instead have the similar sort of longing that Ms. Horvath expresses above. For those who can’t find a monogamous or quasi-monogamous pairing, you can always pay to have your desires sated or lower your standards. Some steal—just like white-collar criminals, it’s the most privileged who are the most brazen with this and the least privileged who are most likely to be stolen from. With your sexual choices atomized, however, you are subject to the vagaries of beauty, class, privilege, and race. Welcome to an emotional and sexual Randian paradise.

This contrast exposes the ugly fact that sexual libertinism is class warfare. The true victims of the sexual revolution are not the middle-class evangelicals who must now guard their children’s eyes during prime-time television; they are the poor families rent asunder by the chaos of liberated sexual decision making. The example of this that struck me most poignantly of late can be found here. Poor women have less power overall, and so they tend to be more susceptible to the relational chaos, unwanted pregnancy, and disease that goes along with the relentless destructive power of hyperindividualized sexuality. The latter two are things that can be remedied somewhat by the aggressive provision of the appropriate pills and medical interventions, but until the pharmaceutical companies can put relational stability in a pill, all bets are off. Furthermore, anyone who has ever provided such medical interventions can affirm that these prescriptions are no magic bullet.

The concept of consent, which undergirds the whole enterprise, should not be ignored. We have to learn from how feminism has decoded the power plays that attempted to undermine legitimate concerns about female sexuality. However, we must not buy into the deception that consent is all we need; as the inimitable Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry observed recently, a teenage girl can consent to working 16-hour days in an exploitative garment factory. As long as these sorts of power differentials exist, emotional and sexual Randianism will run rampant; “consent” is crucial but an insufficient basis for sexual morality. Thus, when choosing your own sexual adventure benefits the privileged, the harm done to the less privileged becomes the personal injury that complements the cultural insult of depersonalizing sexuality.

However, traditional sexual morality— at least as it has been commonly practiced—is not entirely a panacea. Without a vigorous understanding of consent, we have allowed our own instances of abuse and exploitation— for example, not legally considering the category of marital rape until a few decades ago. Those of us most firmly committed to emphasizing sexual difference must be the loudest advocates for understanding the power differentials at hand, embracing Christlike self-sacrifice, and building communities that have the appropriate policies guarding us against harming others. (The work of Boz Tchividjian and G.R.A.C.E. are invaluable in this regard.) Furthermore, as we have tried to affirm the sanctity of sex and God’s institutional provisions to protect this sanctity, we have relied on shame and sexual double standards to get this done.

All sex is publicly sanctioned or shamed. Shame is a powerful human force, and it is clear from the Bible that God uses sexual shame to turn people to repentance— both publicly and privately. Indeed, the ability to take instances of sexual aggression to the court of public opinion when a criminal court falls short of its apparent duties is part of why feminism ought to be at odds with sexual atomization. This has worked well for the military but not so well for the Duke Lacrosse players.

Accordingly, the ability of a community to publicly weigh in from a more traditional sexual ethic has its own pitfalls, as the moral ecology that upholds the virtues of modesty and virginity can be poisoned by victim-blaming, as the Maryville case indicates. Public shame is a powerful force that can be used to goad people into changing course, but it should not be used lightly. When, as my sister once observed, modesty is joked about as “girls, no bikinis; guys, no speedos” and it is inferred that a woman is “at fault” when a man looks at her lustfully, we have imported worldly standards that demean women and diminish their personhood by emphasizing the power of their sexual parts. Rachel Held Evans unpacks this quite well—again, sex and clothes become a struggle when we don’t recognize the power dynamics that are necessarily at work within fallen sexuality.

If we return to the analogy of libertarianism and money (once again, I will openly admit I’m taking my cues from Wendell Berry) we see that the answers to the abuses of individual freedom are thrift and community, which correspond to the Christian values of marriage and church.

When considering the social science data, the clear correlation between poverty and the weakening of marriage does not always lend itself to easy answers about the subject. Indeed, it is clear that we run the risk of making stable marriage just as much a perk of the privileged. It is easier, perhaps, to say that we ought to address the structural inequalities in our society before we trifle with marriage. Certainly the movements within evangelicalism that are addressing structural inequalities by reconciling people across class deserve our attention just as much as their input on making marriage meaningful for the people who would benefit most from it. As powerful as our political and moral defenses of marriage in recent years have been, we must acknowledge the temptation to be subsumed by our hyperindividualistic culture and let our support of marriage be divorced from the wider local community that holds marriages accountable.

Just as sexual behavior can be publicly shamed, it can be publicly celebrated. Every adult who goes to a wedding knows that the couple saying vows in front of them will be having sex in a short matter of time; by attending the wedding they are in some way supporting the union of that couple, even as that couple is giving the community the power to judge their union. This is not to say that sex is the ultimate purpose of marriage, but it is the most (literally!) tangible sign that two people have united. The consent given in marriage is not a contract between two independent blobs of protoplasm that won’t try to prosecute the other one after the fact; it is a covenant by those who know this couple intimately. Both family (“May I have your daughter’s hand in marriage?”) and community (“If anyone objects to this union, speak now or forever hold your peace.”) are crucial to the covenant. How perverse it is that we have the opposite happening right now, with various pop stars simulating sex acts in public with tongues clucking on Facebook after salaciously watching on YouTube. The appeal of money and the strength of our sinful inclination to depersonalize others’ sexuality will always trump vague appeals to respect and consent; something stronger— and more personal—is needed.

Evangelicalism, in reaction to the “Victorian” stereotypes which were and still are often perpetuated by ignorance and shame, has now tried to counter the cultural cry for atomized sexual pleasure at any cost by encouraging Christian couples to have all sorts of great sex. The foibles of such an approach may not have been foreseen, but they are apparent nonetheless. For many Christians, there is probably still some need for liberation and a few pointers of the mechanics—but these conversations ought to be happening person-to-person, not from the pulpit.

What we should be praising from the pulpit is not multi-orgasmic gymnastics, but boring sex. For boring sex is the most important kind of sex—it is the sex that we engage in when we want more than parts colliding, sex that is not “all nerves” but involves both body and soul. People have boring sex to give things other than fluids to their partner and take things other than pleasure. It is not essential to subscribe to traditional Christian morality in order to enjoy the benefits of boring sex (although most non-Christians who do end up gently aping the contours of Christian sexuality), but Christian theology provides us with the most compelling understanding of sexuality. Monogamy, then, is the sexual thrift and savings that produces dividends capable of cementing our relationships to one another. And marriage is the contractual institution that clarifies our duties to one another and holds us accountable when we slip. The communities that we live in—most especially the church—are our witnesses and shareholders.

In this way, even the people who are faithful to Christian sexual ethics by remaining celibate both contribute to the institution of marriage and reap its benefits, in contrast to the thoroughly individualistic sexual beings described beforehand. Those who have wandered from this vision and return in repentance—single parents, for example—still find themselves in a loving community that they shape and are shaped by. For even a vision of sexual morality that embraces the ability to make public judgments on another’s sexual choices and halfheartedly embraces monogamy—as many of my non-Christian friends do—is still painfully atomized, as a close reading of Hannah Horvath’s quote above reveals. As Christians join together in churches, they learn from one another the practices of stable fidelity and enjoy its fruits. This can happen in weekly worship, serving missionally together throughout the week, and even living together. Most importantly, we study God’s precepts for community and faithfulness together and practice them among one another.

Christian sexual ethics is not about creating individual, autonomous couplings that boost singular nuclear families to the middle class but communities made up of families and singles that support one another and build the social capital that keeps us thriving. This ethic is distinctively Christian and centered on His Church, for it is in Jesus that we find the most compelling meaning of sex. He hung naked on a cross and was jeered by everyone watching so that our shame could be put to death on that cross. He never took an earthly wife in order to prepare for Himself a heavenly bride who will dine with him at a great wedding feast. He promised us a comforter, the Holy Spirit, who empowers us to deny the urges that would lead us into using sex to tear other people apart from the inside out— whether it’s verbally or otherwise. He has risen again in glory and clothed us with His righteousness, which transforms the way we look at ourselves and one another—body and soul.

Posted by Matthew Loftus

Matthew Loftus teaches and practices Family Medicine in Baltimore and East Africa. His work has been featured in Christianity Today, Comment, & First Things and he is a regular contributor for Christ and Pop Culture. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.MatthewAndMaggie.org

This is a good post in what it affirms, but I worry that you have rejected too much. You rip Evangelicals for their anti-“Victorian” bawdy pulpit talk, but then also reject the core of the Victorian project of lifting lower classes:

Christian sexual ethics is not about creating individual, autonomous couplings that boost singular nuclear families to the middle class but communities made up of families and singles that support one another and build the social capital that keeps us thriving.

Victorians understood that out-of-bounds sex hurt the poor and believed that monogamous, industrious couplings were the surest rout to prosperity. You want both the good that the Victorians accomplished, while rejecting their aim as too focused on nuclear units. I see this partially because I don’t think the Victorian focus on nuclear-unit integrity was anti-communal as a lot of Marxists do, I think that the way you build a strong chain is to have a lot of strong links.

jakemeador

Keith – Isn’t it fair though to point out that many evangelicals have often focused on protecting the traditional family without protecting the network of relationships and community that made the traditional family possible? Protecting the traditional family implies supporting an entire way of life, not just pushing certain political priorities and talking a lot about the importance of marriage, which is often how the evangelical witness on the topic has come across in the past–although that is certainly changing, I think.

“Keith – Isn’t it fair though to point out that many evangelicals have often focused on protecting the traditional family without protecting the network of relationships and community that made the traditional family possible? ”

No? : )

jakemeador

I really should know better than to ask those kind of questions in a Mere O comment thread, shouldn’t I?

If by “network of relationships and community that made the traditional family possible?” you mean friends, extended family, local communities, and so on..then I bet the major evangelical family ministries have made a lot of their importance for marital happiness and success. Think about the many financial ministries, after all, like Crown that have been aimed at helping people navigate financial limitations in part because they add stress to marriages. And what movement created the “small group” to build local connections of support for like-minded people? And so on.

Also, what percentage of the Focus on the Family’s budget went to politics? : )

jakemeador

Hmm. So my hunch is that this is going to tie into that “against church planting” idea I’m working with right now. The kind of work I’m talking about would focus more on protecting the material conditions that make long-term community possible–which is going to get a little too Wendell Berry for your tastes, I’m guessing, but which is really important, I think.

Where were evangelicals when it came to protecting small towns or family farms, for instance? Those are huge sources of community in the US traditionally that have struggled a ton in the past 50-60 years. Neighborhood associations would be another biggie on that front, I think. Basically, what are evangelicals doing to combat the stuff that Putnam was talking about in “Bowling Alone”? If all we have to show is voluntaristic organizations whose entire viability is dependent upon otherwise-disconnected individuals forming some sort of bond over once-a-week get togethers, then I think we have a problem. But I may be much less hopeful about those approaches to community than you.

I don’t know….once a week bowling leagues or once a week community groups? Is it really that much worse? Is that going to solve *everything*? Of course not. Why are bowling leagues “communal”, but church small groups “voluntaristic”?

As to “protecting” small towns, do you have in mind some sort of government programs (subsidizing the local antique mall so it stays afloat)? But does *anyone* know how to “save” small towns at the moment? It doesn’t seem to me like they do, nor have I yet seen a good argument for what it is that small towns *as small towns* have that is so crucial for saving. I’m not saying that there isn’t something, but I bet I grew up in a smaller town than anyone in this conversation, which means I may be tough to satisfy in that regard.

Keith Miller

Only way to save a small town in my neck of the woods: have a liberal arts college there. That sucks resources from the cities and suburbs out to the boonies. Other than that, all the rest of the small towns are dying.

I think the only proposal that could realistically save small towns would be the complete dismantling of industrial farming, necessitating an increase in the rural workforce. It would be akin to the cultural shift we experienced when the severely mentally ill were deinstitutionalized: powerful institutions voluntarily surrendered power because of a moral concern.

I think Jake is probably more qualified to write this than I am… unless you just wanted a quick-and-dirty “animal cruelty is bad and so is soil runoff” article.

jakemeador

Animal cruelty and soil runoff is a major concern and I’d say both should be classified as moral concerns. That said, “feeding everyone” is also a moral concern.

I do think we’ll see an increased move toward ethically raised meats as that movement gains more momentum. It’s pretty difficult to defend the excesses of factory farming once you’re aware of them. That said, I think we’re 20-30 years away from seeing much movement on this on the agriculture front. There are groups out there doing great work at getting higher yields with organic methods. (The Land Institute is one, there’s another group profiled in “Making Peace with the Land,” which was released a year or two back by IVP, I believe.)

But until we can reliably grow higher yields with organic methods, I don’t think we’ll see a move away from larger farms. And even once we do get higher yields with organic, there’s no reason that large farms can’t simply move toward organic, is there? A move back toward organic farming doesn’t necessarily equal a move back toward smaller family farms.

The other piece here, of course, is how much of a crank you are with energy issues. If you go the route some of the FPR folks do, you can argue that the whole system we have regarding food and cities right now is dependent on the wide-scale accessibility of cheap energy. But if energy costs go up, being able to sustain your life from a smaller geographic area will become more important. But a lot of this stuff is highly speculative at this point. We’ll have a better idea of where things stand in 5-10 years, I think.

I think combining less industrial agriculture with more local agriculture (also addresses some of the urban blight and unemployment/underemployment problem) makes the tradeoff better.

In short: MOAR FARMERS

jakemeador

Well, another thought to consider is that in many ways there isn’t a significant difference in terms of engendering community between a small town off on its own and a small town like Hudson WI, which is 30 minutes from St. Paul and 45 from Minneapolis. If suburbs moved to a place where they were more self-contained, then I think you could see a lot of the benefits of small-town life there. The problem is more about geographically scattered lives than with suburbs themselves.

My next Mere-O pitch is probably going to be “Life Together: Like, In The Same House.”

Keith Miller

Jake and Matthew,

I’d like to pick up on this because I’m not sure that either of you understood the thrust of my argument. Consider this passage from Jamie Smith and Mark Mulder:

Eminent urban historian Robert Fishman has suggested a historical link between particularly evangelical religious commitments and the historical emergence of suburbia. Fellow historian Margaret Marsh noted, “Fishman’s study of the origins of the Anglo-American suburb underscores the idea that suburbs emerged from a particular set of beliefs—an ideology that grew out of evangelical religion and ideas about the ‘closed domesticated nuclear family.’” According to Fishman, the emergence of single-class suburbs was motivated by the desire of an emerging bourgeois class in eighteenth-century England to segregate itself from the squalor of the poor. However, this was compounded by a marked change in the configu- ration of the bourgeois family. Drawing on the work of Lawrence Stone, Fishman equated the emergence of the bourgeois family with a new social configuration in which the nuclear, “immediate” family becomes “the primary and overwhelming focus of its members’ lives.” Such a “modern” family is “not a natural biological unit that has remained constant through history but [rather] the product of a long historical evolution.” In earlier social configurations, the family was “‘open’ in the sense that ‘outside’ influences from neighbors and kin outweighed internal ties among the ‘nucleus’ of faith, mother, and children.” But by the 18th century, a new, more intense configuration of the family emerges (which Fishman took to be a reflection of a wider emphasis on increased personal autonomy encouraged by merchant capitalism): “The result was Stone’s ‘closed, domesticated nuclear family;’ closed in around itself, separated from its environment, focused especially on mutual intimacy and on child raising.”

When you read the whole piece, you’ll find that Mulder and Smith are down on this conception of the family, (an opinion they share with the Marxists). But what if these Evangelical nuclear-family-uber-alles suburbanites have it right? That’s the position that I am drawn to, and one which your argument could be used to support.

Hmmm, well the more I understand your argument, the more I think it clashes with the second half of mine: defending marriage qua marriage (regardless of the presence of children) can easily be part of the atomization and individualism inherent in our culture which works against church community & fellowship. We have already talked about the suburbs before pretty thoroughly, but any design intended to maximize physical and emotional distance from your neighbors and your fellow churchmembers is probably not really facilitating the beloved community. I really don’t see how “these Evangelical nuclear-family-uber-alles suburbanites” are supported by what I’m saying here except in the most superficial, Horvathian, blind-to-their-own-privliege way.

Keith Miller

Yes, I think we’ve flushed out the point of disagreement. You with Smith, et al., are skeptical about promoting a norm of monogamy–even the boring kind–because it may be unduly alienating of those not so called and may be an actual barrier to ecclesiastical community. On this point, I part ways from you and side with those crazy Victorians.

I was hoping that your advocacy for the boring and mundane component of sexuality might draw you to my side, but I see you aren’t there yet.

Thanks for commenting! As I mentioned on twitter, “Victorian” in scare quotes was really meant to signify that I wasn’t dealing so much with the actual Victorian-era sexual politics as the slur directed against a shame-based sexual ethic. I was trying to skewer the people who use the term lazily and now apparently I have been hoisted on my own petard there.

As far as the question of nuclear units goes, I think Jake answered the question quite skillfully. I would add that there is a very strong NT teaching about church community and whatever we are teaching, preaching, & practicing about the nuclear family has to support that. I’m not sure if you saw the post from Christena Cleveland (http://www.christenacleveland.com/2013/12/singled-out/), but I think we have some work to do in finding a balance between going against the larger cultural grain by encouraging marriage & family as a good thing and going against the subcultural grain that tends to push singles (especially sexual minorities) to the margins. The folks over at Spiritual Friendship are doing a marvelous job at exploring a lot of these issues.

Keith Miller

Can you clarify further? Do you want us to practice shame-based sexual ethics or not?

You dislike the “slur” Victorian, because you agree that shame should play some role, yet you also dislike any nuclear-family-chauvinism that may make singles feel ashamed. I don’t think you can buy in to a tightly-knit community of sexual morality and then tap out at the first sign of someone being marginalized. As they say in the tech world, that’s not a bug, its a feature.

A tightly-knit community of sexual morality made up of people who subscribe to Biblical faith would (a) likely contain a few celibate GLBT or non-GLBT-but-still-not-yet-married folks off the bat & (b) have a vigorous understanding of forgiveness and love (see my last paragraph) that facilitated discipleship & fellowship of single parents, sexual abuse survivors, GLBT persons, et. al. Jesus told us that eunuchs would be part of the fellowship of believers for a variety of reasons; as the more privileged people in this fellowship it does us all well to consider the concerns of the less privileged.

Keith Miller

Okay. So you are down on the Victorians and their use of shame after all?

I think we have to thread the needle of shame to condemn the unrepentant sinner (which is the theological use of shame) but not break the bruised reed. Jesus’ example in John 8, while often misused, is perfect in this regard: He calls out the powerful for their zeal to condemn and He calls out the woman caught in adultery to repent while still advocating for her against the power structure that discriminated against her. In this way, shame is kinda like righteous anger: plenty of good Biblical examples, part of the normal human experience, but easy to fall into sin so we need careful guards around it.

How do you think we should shape the moral ecology of the church community in regards to shame, particularly for people like repentant single moms, GLBT folks who have never been in a sinful relationship, or abuse survivors?

wmrharris

I would highlight the role of “boring:” practically, because it reflects the lived reality of many (most?) couples; and second for how it echoes the Benedictine emphasis on “stability.” In a culture of individualistic sexuality, “boring” appears as a condemnation, a settling for second-best, at best. Unpack that a bit further and the self-condemnation we encounter with “boring” is the expectation of our self as deserving more, of being more, etc.

I think here is where that turn to stability helps. “Boring” is also another way of being where we are; stability is the word of enclosure in the monastic tradition. Boring would be the place where God gets to work, because we begin to surrender our self just a bit.

Boring also would mean letting go of the idolatry of individualistic sexuality that so dominates our culture. That’s why those “boring” marriages can then create the space for singles; the practice of surrender to a place (our stability) opens the door to hospitality and welcome.

Lady Julian

Reminds me of Lauren Winner’s _Real Sex_. She too stressed that sex is to happen within a community, that only the body of believers supporting each other can make marriage a worthy endeavour. Highly recommended.